Here we are, mere hours from a good, old-fashioned family holiday… so why not spice things up with a discussion of the role sex education can play in shaping teenagers’ fragile body image? That’s exactly what I’m doing over on Never Say Diet today.
It’s inspired by the New York Times Magazine cover story, Teaching Good Sex, where a private school teacher (teaching sex ed as an elective to seniors) gets to say crazy sh*t like “I don’t think it’s necessarily unhealthy to have sex at age 17,” and show students videos about female ejaculation (because we’ve misguidedly decided “it’s O.K. that boys ejaculate, that’s totally normalized […] but girls, gross! Girls will think they’re peeing themselves, and it’s really shameful.”).
Obviously, you want to go straight back to high school and enroll in a class like that… although the article is pretty clear on the sad fact that there is no other class like that in the entire country. Which is a shame, not only because most American teenagers are lacking crucial information about sex (and getting it from porn or Cosmo instead) but also because most American teenagers are struggling to feel normal in their bodies in a whole variety of ways — and sex education is a prime opportunity for sage adults to normalize all of those things, and hey, while we’re at it, maybe get kids thinking about a broader definition of beauty. Than, you know, exclusively the kind of beauty they see in porn.
More on all of that over on Never Say Diet. Click, read, thank me for your Turkey Day ice breaker anecdotes later!
I read that article, loved it. Wish the whole world would read it and institute similar classes in every high school. Seriously.
I think this article is really great. I grew up going to a school where they taught abstinence only the whole time, so I really did not know, still don’t really know that much about sex education. To have someone come to my school and say something like that, I think it’d be incredibly shocking but it would open a lot of horizons, especially seeing the women’s perspective of things. It’s so true, that it’s completely normal for a guy to jack off, but for a girl to, it’s almost unheard of. Also, I completely agree that it would be so much healthier to have a realistic idea about sex instead of the fake scenarios seen in porn.